Walden, The Second Port of Cathedrals.

Burnished silver stands against Chaos. Storms as icebergs shattering against the walls of a city five-hundred years old. The fortress of the north.

Alas, now all teeters at the precipice of annihilation, the formless, grotesque void reaching up to rake its hideous claws over that fair city, the forever-advocate of our Lord Benefactor.

An odious crime has manifested itself… and there is only one person who is capable of solving such a crime. No… only one person trustworthy enough to solve such a crime.

YOU are a member of the Lord Benefactor’s esteemed, feared Inquisitorial Order, and have headed to this northernmost bastion of the known world to resolve the danger that now threatens the stability of our Lord-blessed realm. Armed with only a magical ring, as a member of the Inquisitorial Order, you must survive on wits (and intimidating presence) alone.

The truth will not root itself out, after all…

–

So I’ve spent the last few weeks really getting stuck into a design document and figuring out what this game will look like.

This will be a Twine-based game, which means players will pick from a proscribed list of choices that bounce them from node-to-node. A small set of well-considered and well-rendered characters will carry the player through what I presume to be a relatively short playtime for an “RPG” of sorts.

As it would constitute the first game I’ve ever released publicly, I have had to be very careful when considering the scope. I have plans for larger projects, but they are not by any means able to be actioned upon right now. I also have potential ways to increase the scope of this game (in what I hope would be a clever way if I decided to), but for now, I’m keeping it relatively restrained. Really more just a proof-of-concept kind of thing at this stage anyway, to prove that I can make something robust and considered in a video game space. I have discussed with a few people (some folk reading might be among those people) about what kinds of games I want to make, and a few small ideas I have here and there to make them. For now, this Twine game will be a first step before I move on to developing larger or at least more sophisticated projects (which will take one of two forms, I imagine: horror games or role-playing games).

The setting was something I actually salvaged. Sort of. Back when I was a teenager (some years ago now), I had an ongoing D&D campaign for about a year or so – back when I was really learning how to be a DM, what my style was, what the dos-and-donts were of running a tabletop campaign. So inevitably interest fell away from a campaign I was running, but I had developed a particular setting for that world that players never got to see, and it languished in a folder of worlds I have built over many years (far too many to count, really). The world needed a lot of work – it was a D&D-coded world, after all, so came with a lot of the baggage that such a thing entails. You probably know what it means: dwarves, elves, halflings, and so forth.

In an attempt to salvage the essence of the world, which I believed to be worth saving, I cut away a lot of the messy fat that naturally entails running a Dungeons & Dragons campaign when you are a teenager, and reconstructed it from a base level. At least, I engaged with the ideas wholeheartedly, rather than dancing around them a bit, and so essentially reforged a world which had a thematic consistency, with ideas that will (hopefully) challenge the player on some level at least.

The game is only just beginning to grow from a design document into actual text that can be played through, with choices that can be enacted. I have no doubt that I will uncover hidden complexities baked into my own game’s design that unfolds naturally through development that will balloon the time.

Visuals are something I am still learning. I can sort of draw objects okay in pixel art, but human anatomy remains far out of my grasp for now. For my project after this, I will get properly engaged with Blender (too many other deadlines and various stresses going on right now to try and engage with that), but for now I suspect the most I will have are small UI elements, at least for the first draft of the game, as it were.

Hope this has piqued everyone’s interest. When I have more to share, I’ll write that here. I’ll also release my game via Patreon when it’s done, and probably try and get it up on GameJolt or itch.io if I feel it is of relevant quality. But both those things are no doubt quite some time away.

The characters and the overall plot are something I’d keep relatively close to my chest until later in development, as they are obviously something that a player should probably engage with themselves in play before I bother elaborating. But the world, maybe I can talk about that a little more.

The Isle of Ethal, as my younger self dubbed it, was drawn out of my imagination out of a desire to create a part of the world with a slightly tougher edge – or at least present a new set of problems for my players. Monsters were one of the things I spent a long time working on, I think, though I can’t see that particular hard work making its way into my new project. Though suffice it to say, the cathedral that sequestered in the middle of a blackened forest filled with swarming, ravenous crows, which presided over an unfathomably murky lake, remains one I’d like to conjure to the screen one day, one way or another. That was where the campaign ended, actually – perhaps that’s part of my desire to resurrect it. To do those ideas justice, as I thought they should have been done all those years ago. Except this time, I actually know how to write properly. 

The problem that comes with many medieval fantasy worlds is that, well, they’re medieval fantasy. They’re often quite rote, very western European explorations of a world that changes only really in character and geography, and the occasional magic system shuffle-up. Don’t get me wrong – I love myself a good medieval fantasy world. I read a lot of fantasy (it makes up most of my bookshelf at home), and I feel very much at home in those worlds. But some lesser works of fantasy, much like lesser works of science-fiction, fail to answer or explore questions of difference. Specifically, difference between our world and the world presented in the fiction.

That is one problem I certainly hope to avoid. Being a game about playing a person in a highly religious, inquisitorial order, I want to cross-examine the world I have created through my writing and see if it is robust enough. The position of the player, as a person in this order, will also be one that naturally places you in a position to learn about and then subsequently judge the world and its inhabitants.

The world as conceptualized earlier is quite small – but the world as I will be presenting in the game is even smaller than that. Play will be enacted in just one city, and the events will be relatively short and sweet. I can’t share any more than that about the gameplay for fear of either a) setting myself up for failure, b) setting you up for disappointment, or c) spoiling anything that I think the player should discover for themselves as they play.

I am unsure when I will next write about the game on the blog in this format, as I now turn myself towards the task of actually writing the thing beyond what little I have actually written so far. When I have more to share – whether it is more design musings, or the game itself, I will notify everyone!

Stay safe all, hope you are looking forward to this (and future) projects.